Episode 52: Ora Grodsky & Larry Raskin (Watertown Community Conversations)
Meet Ora Grodsky and Larry Raskin! They're co-founders of Watertown Community Conversations. In this conversation, we talk about how they got interested in the field of facilitation, the tools and techniques important to the work, the creation of Watertown Community Conversations and what it does, and more.
Larry's bio:
Larry is a retired leadership and organizational effectiveness consultant and a community volunteer. Professionally he helped organizations define their missions, overcome challenges, gain commitments, develop team and leadership skills, and implement strategies to achieve their objectives. Larry is a co-founder and former Chair of World in Watertown, an organization that promotes diversity, fair treatment and equal rights. He is also a co-founder of Watertown Community Conversations. Larry is a certified facilitator, workshop leader, trainer and coach. He and his wife have lived in Watertown since 1994.
Ora's bio:
Ora Grodsky is a mission-driven consultant with over 25 years of experience and success working with hundreds of social justice-oriented organizations. Ora is a holistic practitioner who combines training in acupuncture, non-profit management expertise, extensive study of organizational development and commitment to compassion and justice to facilitate transformation change with the organizations who are transforming our world. Ora’s new book, Justice, Love, and Organizational Healing offers insights and wisdom from her deep experience partnering with organizations and individuals to foster health and healing, and aligning and integrating their values, aspirations, and operations to more effectively meet their important missions. Ora is a co-founder of Watertown Community Conversation. She and her husband have lived in Watertown since 1989.
(Click here to listen on streaming apps) (Full transcript below)
Watertown Community Conversations website
Ora's book - Justice, Love, and Organizational Healing
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Transcript
Matt: 0:07
Hi there, welcome to the Little Local Conversations podcast. I'm your host, Matt Hanna. Every episode I sit down for a conversation with someone in Watertown to discover the people, places, stories, and ideas of Watertown. This time I sat down with a couple people, Larry Raskin and Ora Grodsky, who are co-founders of Watertown Community Conversations. We'll get into that and more of their story in the conversation. For a short bio on Ora and Larry before we get in, Ora Gradsky is a mission-driven consultant with over 25 years of experience and success working with hundreds of social justice-oriented organizations.
Matt: 0:41
Ora is a holistic practitioner who combines training in acupuncture, nonprofit management expertise, extensive study of organizational development and commitment to compassion and justice to facilitate transformation change with the organizations who are transforming our world. Ora’s new book, Justice, Love, and Organizational Healing offers insights and wisdom from her deep experience partnering with organizations and individuals to foster health and healing and aligning and integrating their values, aspirations, and operations to more effectively meet their important missions. Ora is a co-founder of Watertown Community Conversations. She and her husband have lived in Watertown since 1989. And Larry is a retired leadership and organizational effectiveness consultant and a community volunteer. Professionally, he helped organizations define their missions, overcome challenges, gain commitments, develop team and leadership skills and implement strategies to achieve their objectives.
Matt: 1:30
Larry is a co-founder and former chair of World in Watertown, an organization that promotes diversity, fair treatment, and equal rights. He is also a co-founder of Watertown Community Conversations. Larry is a certified facilitator, workshop leader, trainer and coach, and he and his wife have lived in Watertown since 1994. So we'll get into both of their backstories and the work that they're doing. So I’ll let them introduce themselves and we'll get into the conversation.
Ora: 1:53
So nice to be here with you and with Larry. I'm Ora Grodsky and I am an organizational development consultant working with mission-driven organizations to help them become more effective in their work.
Larry: 2:04
Hi, I'm Larry Raskin. Thanks for hosting this today. So I'm retired, and I'm retired from work as a leadership and organizational development specialist as well. I'll get into that a little more later. And I'm using some of my professional background in my volunteer work in Watertown.
Matt: 2:21
Great. Well, we'll definitely get into all of that. But I always like to go back in time first and kind of get a picture of how you got interested in this work to begin with. So I'll go in the same order. So, Ora, you want to go first and kind of describe what were your first steps getting involved in that type of work.
Ora: 2:36
So I'll say Larry and I are both part of Watertown Community Conversations, which is a volunteer organization here in Watertown that promotes the use of dialogue for community connection and wise decision making, and my work is about that. So how I got into that is I was an acupuncturist. I went to acupuncture school here in Watertown and became the academic dean of the New England School of Acupuncture many years ago and became more curious in how organizations work, how people come together to do good work, to be in relationship and conversation with each other. More curious about that than knees and elbows, which are the kinds of things you have to really know about to be an acupuncturist. And so I went back to graduate school and that led me on this path.
Matt: 3:17
So what got you into acupuncture?
Ora: 3:19
What got me into acupuncture? Well, now we're going way back. While I was in college, I was working as a baker and I injured my wrist. I went to an acupuncturist and I just thought this is the most amazing thing on earth.
Matt: 3:30
Cool. Yeah, and how long have you been in Watertown for?
Ora: 3:33
I moved to Watertown in 1989 because New England School of Acupuncture was located here at the time and I was working there. It's been a wonderful home. I raised my children here and just love Watertown.
Matt: 3:45
Awesome. How about you, Larry? What was your first step into this world?
Larry: 3:53
So after graduate school, I worked for the Education Collaborative for Greater Boston, which was an association of school systems within basically 128. So it was Boston and suburban communities, Watertown was one of them actually. And I was part of a team that designed learning programs to bring kids together from the suburbs and from city schools. They would join us for three days a week for three weeks with their teachers, sometimes with their parents, and we designed learning experiences for them to get to know each other and to get to know American social history in a deeper, more personal way. Things like immigration, human rights, civil rights, race relations, local history. We worked with artists, we worked with politicians, local community members. It was really a lot of fun. And I was part of that group that designed these learning experiences and facilitated a lot of group discussions with these students, which were really quite amazing. So that was my first intro to that.
Larry: 4:44
Then, professionally, after I left that work, the money was drying up. I went into the for-profit center, into learning and development, training programs, training department, so on, and I became the director of learning and organizational development at a global technology company. So there I had the opportunity to work in Asia, North America, Europe, with people from all kinds of backgrounds and cultures and again I really became very steeped in how people work together, how they interact, what makes for effective teams, how organizations work well as a unit. Then I moved to Watertown about 30 years ago. Got involved in some volunteer work here. Was one of the people who started World in Watertown 25 years ago, which is probably best known for the annual Unity Breakfast on MLK Day. And so I was right back into what's going on, with people from different cultures, different communities, 40 different languages being spoken by kids in public schools in Watertown, which is quite amazing. We did a lot of that kind of work together in small groups. Again, learning experiences and that sort of led me to Watertown Community Conversations.
Matt: 5:49
Yeah, so and I'll ask this follow-up to both of you. So what about that type of work really spoke to you and made you want to pursue it more, like why is this work engaging for you?
Larry: 5:59
So personally for me, I think it gets to the human condition. My vision of humanity in the world is people respect each other, people affiliate with each other, people understand their differences, they respect those differences and they find common ground and they can live together and thrive together. So wherever I feel like I can contribute to that in some way, I feel good about that.
Matt: 6:22
And is there a particular early story that you had that kind of exemplified that for you?
Larry: 6:26
So when I was working at EdCo, there were 60 kids in this one program and we worked with Byron Rushing, who is an African-American leader and was a state rep at the time. We invited him in. He had 60 kids line up. Only he could do this. I couldn't do this. He had 60 kids line up by color, from the whitest to the darkest, and he said, okay, who's black? What makes a person a black person in our society? And he encouraged these kids to talk to each other in the line and then break into small groups that we facilitated. These were kids who were from Puerto Rico, from other countries in Latin America, from various white backgrounds. The conversations were unbelievable that these kids were starting to have with each other, the assumptions they had, the beliefs they had, the family histories they had. And I thought, wow, if kids in small groups could have this kind of powerful conversation and really learn about each other in a respectful way, this is something I could see myself doing.
Matt: 7:25
Yeah. How about you Ora?
Ora: 7:27
Well, a lot of what Larry said about human condition and what's possible for us as a species absolutely resonates with me. That what I really find most engaging and what I love about my work is helping people to have conversations that deepen their understanding, that create deeper relationship and that create different outcomes in our work together. So I came to that when I was Dean of New England School of Acupuncture and really noticed that sometimes our work together went very well and sometimes it didn't go so well. When people started to feel some fear or scarcity, people weren't as kind to each other and we weren't getting as good outcomes in our work. So we brought somebody in to help us and really learned that there are skills, there are processes, there are tools that human beings can use so that in our work with each other, in our conversations with each other, we can come from our aspirations and our hearts and not just from our fear and scarcity. And so that's what got me really interested and I returned, as I said, to graduate school to study that.
Matt: 8:29
Yeah, and is there any early story that you have that kind of exemplifies what you're trying to get at?
Ora: 8:34
Well, just thinking about at the acupuncture school and times where we didn't know, you know where things weren't going quite as well, you know, we would have meetings that were terrible and people felt despondent and we didn't have agreement. Versus then we brought in a facilitator who was able to get us really to a place where we had a sense of clear, shared vision of where we wanted to go, what we were about and what each of our roles were, and it felt like magic.
Matt: 9:01
Yeah, so maybe that's a good segway into what are some of the tools of facilitators that people like. Oh, having a conversation, that's simple, right? What do facilitators do, right? it sounds like Oar, you know, you've been thinking about this one a lot recently because you just wrote a book on this right, called Justice, Love and Organizational Healing: a Guide to Transformational Consulting. So do you want to take the first stab at this then, since you've been knee deep in it.
Ora: 9:24
Thank you for the question, and this is a lot of what we do at Watertown Community Conversations as volunteers for the community, and we train people to do this, is to do what we call setting a container. Facilitation starts long before we get in the room. We think about what is the agenda, what's our purpose for coming into the room. We use a formula called POP, which the first P is purpose. Why are we gathering together? And then the O is what are the outcomes we're looking for. Why are we doing this and where do we want to be at the end of our time together? And then the last P is the process. What are we going to do together? What's our agenda? And so that's always the formula that I follow and that Watertown Community Conversations follows when we do kitchen table conversations in Watertown. We just did a large group event for the accessory dwelling units in partnership with the planning committee.
Ora: 10:13
But it's always about setting a container, having the right agenda, making sure everybody is in the same conversation at the same time, and I think that's a lot of what happens in community. We're trying to make decisions, we're all trying to get our separate agenda met, but in fact, when we can really come together and hear each other and listen well and speak our truth, which is another thing we do in setting the container, we can really have a different kind of process that gets us to different outcomes. So another thing that we do is we have a set of guidelines or ground rules or ways of being for our conversations that people understand. Everybody will have a chance to talk. But we really practice what I call turning up the volume of our listening, so that we're not just thinking about what's the next thing we're going to say, but we're really understanding that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So it's not just me saying my thing and you saying your thing, but I'm listening to it so that we can really build on what each other is thinking. So that's just scratching the surface of how we set the container. I'm sure Larry has other things as well.
Larry: 11:12
Yeah, I certainly agree with Ora and I would recommend people have a look at that book because there's a lot of wisdom there. So in my professional work in organizations I would help people make the distinction between advocacy and inquiry. So we're all very used to advocating for our positions and most of us, most people these days, are very firm on what their opinions are, right. It's a little harder for people to turn that off for a moment and be curious and be sincerely curious through inquiry, through open-ended questions, through having the Buddhist might call it beginner's mind, where you let go of some of your beliefs and assumptions at least to let some other things in.
Larry: 11:51
So as facilitators and as people who try to set up this process that Ora was talking about, we're encouraging people to do some of those very practical, specific behavioral things, which is to clearly state what you believe and why you believe it and make sure then you are open to hearing what other people have to say about that. And the facilitator, as Ora said, holds that vessel and sets up a process by which people can do that. And one of the very interesting things I think we found professionally over the years, and certainly in Watertown, is that it's not always people's first thing, their go-to way of interacting, but when they do it they really like it. We've had people say thank you. Thank you for setting up this time where we do things in a different way and we like the experience and we get a good outcome. So I think that's reinforcing for those of us who are doing this work here.
Matt: 12:42
Right. And before we dive into Watertown Community Conversations, are there any specific success stories or milestones in your professional career before that start of that that you want to highlight as, I know I'm sure there are plenty, but kind of is a good view into the work of a facilitator and kind of highlights your specific approach to it.
Larry: 13:02
One came to mind the other day when I was thinking about this. I had the opportunity to orchestrate and then lead a large-scale facilitation in India. I'd never worked in India before and the room was filled with I don't know 100 or so people from the company where I was working in India. The topic was around values and after presenting the organization's values, we led people into discussion about how present are those values in the organization and how do those values resonate with each of them personally. I got some help, obviously from my Indian colleagues, and we set up all of these small groups and we facilitated them. And just the fact that, I didn’t know any of these people.
Larry: 13:41
I didn't know the Indian culture very well. We set up a process and it really worked and people had these very rich personal discussions that led to some very good results for the organization. I thought, geez, if I can go over here and do this, where I don't really know the culture, I don't know the people, but I sort of know the process and the process worked pretty well. It told me something about the human condition that I've retained, that given the opportunity, as I said a moment ago, people resonate with this stuff. That was a professional aha for me.
Ora: 14:11
That's great. I'm flipping through my book actually, because I wrote a bunch of stories into my book and as I wrote it I really tried to fictionalize it so that the confidentiality of my clients is preserved, but the sense of what happened. And in it I tell a story of a national coalition that I worked with, a membership coalition, and there was a lot of strife and dissent in the coalition and members were very unhappy with what was happening. I worked with a small committee of board members and off-board coalition members to design a process to really listen to members. The executive director traveled around the country having meetings with members that I helped them set up and help design and really hearing why were members so unhappy. Then facilitating the board and this committee to really have an important conversational look in the mirror about what was happening.
Ora: 14:59
They didn't have a shared agreement about even why the coalition existed. People had lots of different ideas. They didn't have a shared sense of the direction for the coalition and so we set up a process where they could clarify those things and really have an inclusive thing that's involved. At their annual conference, we had a day-long members meeting and lots of input from members in lots of different ways and they were able to really clarify their purpose, clarify their values, what they stood for, and clarified what direction they were going to go in their work as a coalition. And I'm happy to say I think that was almost 20 years ago and that coalition is thriving to this day.
Matt: 15:35
Nice. Seems like values come up a lot in these conversations.
Larry: 15:38
Yeah, I'd like to just comment on one thing that Ora said, which is Ora brought the framework of POP into Watertown Community Conversations. So purpose, desired outcomes, and process. And we've trained now 40 facilitators. One of the things they learn is the POP. And so I've had follow-up conversations with some of those people, because they go off, they’re volunteers in other things in Watertown and we wind up talking about the POP. They go into a situation, they help people clarify what are we here for, what is our purpose and what do we want to get out of whatever we're doing, and then what's the process that's going to help us get there. So it's been a very nice, simple way for people to get their heads around what they're trying to do. That has led to some very good outcomes. So thank you, Ora, for doing that.
Ora: 16:19
Well, thank you to Leslie Schull Jaffe and Randall Alford, who developed that framework. That is not me. But I also want to tell a story when my children, who are now grown adults, first started going to meetings, maybe when they were at Watertown High and being these terrible beings, and they would say can you believe there was no POP at the meeting? So I do think if people take just that one thing and put that into their meetings, they will see incredible results and big change.
Matt: 16:41
Yeah, frameworks matter. So we've danced around Watertown Community Conversations a little bit here, so why don't we dig right into that? How did that come to be? What led to the creation of that?
Ora: 16:52
I will say it was at a time after the marathon bombing and shooting here in Watertown and the firefighters were renegotiating their contract. It was very acrimonious. There was a lot of just bad feeling all around and I thought we just know so much, how to do that. So a bunch of us got together, had conversations about it. What do we do? How can we bring this way of working, way of being into Watertown?
Larry: 17:17
I think some of the catalyst for it was the Unity Breakfast. That's where some of those conversations started. There were, I don't know, four or five hundred people. I was involved in World in Watertown, I chaired it for 15 years and we love this time when the community can come together. And so the difference of what was going on with the firefighters where there was of a lot of contention and the fact that 500 or so members of the Watertown community came together at the Hellenic Center for a common purpose. Oh there's something we ought to be doing around here that will take Watertown as a community maybe to the next level to help work through some of the conflicts that existed. And Cecilia Lenk, who was a council person at the time, was very interested in that, and I think that's how the ball got rolling.
Matt: 18:02
And did you two know each other prior to this?
Ora: 18:05
I think maybe I knew who you were. Maybe through World in Watertown, but we didn't know each other.
Matt: 18:10
So it's really just at that Unity breakfast and sitting down and talking about that issue?
Larry: 18:16
There was like a half a dozen people or so who were interested, who we knew, and we met in my then office at the time in Watertown Square. We started kicking around some ideas and we knew about some other communities that had done similar things, like Portsmouth, New Hampshire has an organization called Portsmouth Listens. Gloucester. We knew about them so we thought there's something there we should look into. So we started looking into it and once we gelled a little bit, we didn't want to go too far because we knew, as change consultants some of us, that you have to engage people if you're trying to create something new. So we actually went out into the community. We interviewed 25 community leaders who were elected people in Watertown and heads of not-for-profits. So the head of the Unitarian Church, for example, and John Portz, who was the president of the school committee. We put a little script together.
Larry: 19:04
Here's some things we're thinking about for Watertown. We'd like to get your thoughts about how useful this might be. Community X, community Y they're doing something like this, and here's what we're thinking. What do you think? How useful would this be? What are some of the issues that are coming up in Watertown where more community dialogue, more community engagement, more input might be helpful? They would tell us some of the areas. Are there any cautions that you think we should be aware of, or how could we make this work better? We got some really good input from people. Plus, they were now starting to get a little bought in, you know, because we had asked their opinion. We went with curiosity, as we were saying before. So that led to our first big event, right.
Ora: 19:42
We invited a lot of those folks to come and have a taste of dialogue. It was at the Marriott.
Larry: 19:47
Yeah, they gave us a free room.
Ora: 19:48
They gave us their meeting room and we had over 25 people there.
Larry: 19:52
And we also engaged a group called Essential Partners, who used to be in Watertown. They're now in Cambridge. They do this kind of work as a business, not-for-profit business in communities around the country and sometimes outside the US. So they have some very good tools and very good stories about how communities have benefited from using dialogue for community engagement and decision-making. They showed a little video. They helped provide some examples and some credibility, which I feel like helped cement this idea in the minds of some of the Watertown leaders who were there that night.
Ora: 20:26
Yeah, it was really a wonderful night and people got very interested. So we've done a few different projects with the town in collaboration. We've also did some work with the library. For a while they had something called Democracy Talks where they would have a speaker come and then we facilitated small group dialogue of people rather than just hearing a speaker. But people got to talk to each other and engage. Larry, maybe you'll talk about the projects that we've done in Watertown.
Larry: 20:50
Yeah, would that be something to get into now, or did you want?
Matt: 20:53
Right before we dive into that, I just want to, so what, those early conversations with leaders. What did you learn from that conversation in terms of what you were coming into it with? I know you're saying curiosity, but I'm sure you had some basic ideas of what you were looking to do. And then what they said in response.
Larry: 21:07
I remember one thing that stood out for me. A couple of people said this is a great idea to have some small group discussions on these important projects in the city. We need to have the city actively involved to sponsor this stuff, so it's not just coming out of nowhere, but the city wants to do this and wants to hear from people. That was a big one, and one they said was, the first time we do this, don't pick the most intractable problem we have. Because if it doesn't work then it's going to cast a bad light on this process. So pick one where there are differences of opinion but there's a reasonable chance of success. And we thought well, that was probably a wise way to go. Thank you for that.
Matt: 21:45
Yeah, and so what were some of the early projects then?
Ora: 21:51
So I mentioned Democracy Talks with the library. And then we worked before the pandemic, we worked with the Committee on Media and Outreach at the time Town Council subcommittee on that and really looking at how do we promote community engagement in the community. And so we used what we call kitchen table conversations as a way to do that. So we worked very closely with the town councillors who were on that committee to design what did they want to know, what would be helpful to them. And then they reached out and I think we had 19 or 20 in that round, hosts, people that were willing to have their neighbors, people they knew in town, come to their house and have a conversation with a Watertown Community Conversation facilitator. And in many cases there were town councilors who just observed the conversation.
Ora: 22:31
You know, we had a little bit of a budget. People had some snacks out. And these conversations neighbors came together to talk about how are they already engaging with the town, what are the ways they'd like to have information, what are the ways that they would like to engage in the future. And it reached beyond the people that are comfortable going to City Hall, comfortable having our voices heard because we come from backgrounds where perhaps we've been told that that's okay for us to do. But for a lot of folks it's not as comfortable to go down to City Hall to testify, and so people were able to come to these who, what they said was beyond the usual suspects, deeper into the community, and as a result of that, perhaps, Larry, you can talk about what happened.
Larry: 23:12
So just a couple other things that I think about the process, because Ora and I and a couple other people involved are change consultants, we understand how to help an organization reach out to people. So we wanted to try to make sure that the town councilors at the time they found the hosts and the hosts found their neighbors. So already we're beyond the usual suspects, as Ora said. So that was quite helpful. I think we had 125, 150 people from different parts of Watertown. We had a chart, how many people from this district? How many people from this district? How many? Did we have enough coverage over in District C, you know, so tried to pay attention to that.
Larry: 23:46
The other element of it, this is a learning for us. I think that there was also a learning component that the city councilor sent to us. You know we've got these newsletters that go out. We got this website. It's underutilized. They put together a list of all the tools that are already available in Watertown or were at the time. Most people didn't know about them, so we had a little fact sheet as part of this conversation where people said, oh really, I didn't know. That was a learning experience for them.
Ora: 24:11
And I would add that we then had quite a number of different facilitators. A lot of people went and just did one, facilitated one conversation. These were people that had been through our trainings. We've done three in the past and we have another one coming up in May, May 2nd and 3rd that we'll talk more about. But they had a real chance for a lot of different people to experience facilitating their neighbors.
Larry: 24:31
So some of the outputs were around having more interactions with their local city councilor representatives, having an annual state of the town address, which is actually taking place now, to improve the website, to have staff who had some skills in community engagement. And they actually the city, the town then actually hired somebody in the IT department who had a background in community engagement and we felt like they heard what we had to say. And I think, the other part of it which I'm now remembering because it was a while ago, we took all the results from these 20 kitchen table conversations, we had a public meeting in the library where everybody was invited. So we had a chance to kind of massage the input a little bit. Town councilors came and the president of the town council came and they all heard this stuff and so it catalyzed some changes that the town council was able to undertake to improve the level of communication between residents and elected officials.
Ora: 25:29
And we now have a community engagement specialist on staff in Watertown.
Larry: 25:33
Yeah, and that came about, I think, through this. You know, some of these things take a while. You keep kind of reiterating and you go back. So the charter built on some of this, which we can talk about also. The charter process reinforced some of this and strengthened those messages, and the city made some decisions.
Matt: 25:48
Yeah, and then what is the structure of your organization? So you guys are volunteers and you know like how does that work?
Ora: 25:52
We have a core group of folks there are about eight of us now who meet monthly. We're all volunteers and we divide up into different projects that people are interested in or different things people are interested in doing. So some folks recently did the project I mentioned around accessory dwelling units with the planning committee. Other folks are working on the training we have coming up. There's some other projects in the pipeline people are working on. We partner with, we have to have a sponsor, so we're not the people who say, hey, come have a dialogue. We really provide the process, help for people to have those meetings.
Larry: 26:28
Ora and I designed and ran the first two facilitator trainings and we've had one since and one coming up. Good news is that everybody, except for the two of us who is now on the core team, went through the training. So they got motivated by, well, they were motivated to come to the training, but then there was something there for them that they said hey, how can I make more of a contribution, not just wait for a project. And so they joined the core team, which is great.
Ora: 26:53
And Watertown, pound for pound probably has more facilitators living here than any place else on earth. It's quite remarkable. So we love, you know, for me, this is my profession, but it's a really beautiful way I can give back to the community. I'm not so good at bake sales or things like that, but this is something that I can do, that I have expertise in and offer as a member of the community.
Larry: 27:12
And I think you, Ora, really were a catalyst for us to think about, these are not facilitators who will only work on city-sponsored projects, but the people who come to the training are already active in various things in their professions, in their other work with the schools, with other not-for-profits in Watertown. So whatever they take from the training, they're now kind of going out into the community and doing their thing. So Ora helped us really appreciate how great it could be, will be, is, that we have this cadre of people who have these values and now these skills to take into the part of the community where they're doing their work. So you know, it raises all boats. What's the, rising tide, it raises all ships, it's something like that.
Ora: 27:56
So the training coming up is going to be Friday night, May 2nd, from 530 to 730. And Saturday, May 3rd, from 945 to 4 at the Residence Inn, the Marriott on Arsenal Street. And if you want to have more information you can go to Watertowncommunityconversations.org website. There's a place you can register. And there's a minimal cost of 12 dollars to cover the food and materials and we can waive that if that's a hardship for anyone. And we really welcome people who are curious to become people who can hold conversations for people to listen and work together in respectful and productive ways.
Matt: 28:33
Yeah, and does that just train anybody who's interested? Or it's like the assumption that you would join the WCC or what is?
Ora: 28:37
Yeah, we hope that you'll be interested in becoming in our pool of facilitators so that the next time there's a project, we can do a call and say, hey, who wants to be part of this? And then people can come and do that, as we did with the ADU project. That wasn't the same format. That was a large group. We had everybody in the room together for that. This just happened at the end of March. We broke up into small groups and were facilitated by people who had been through the trainings. And the reason we did that in that way is there was so much information people had to know about accessory dwelling units in order to have good conversations about it, and so the folks from the planning committee and the housing trust really had to give a context and be in that room. So we couldn't do the breakout in people's homes model.
Larry: 29:20
So it's really nice to have a pool of people who are interested in this stuff. So then we put the word out and invite them to participate. So the other two that people have gotten involved in, one is the Watertown Square Improvement Project. That was a big deal and we met with George Proakis and Steve Magoon and others, the urban planners, and we had a component of kitchen table conversations that was one of the feeders for the improvement projects and we helped them figure out how, in the big meetings that they had, how they could make sure that they were getting right inputs that the urban planners were facilitating. We did that. That was a good one.
Larry: 29:53
Oh, and the most recent Unity Breakfast on MLK Day. The designers wanted to change the format, not have one keynote speaker, but have table conversations among all the people there. So it was kind of cool because the Kingian-trained students from the middle school and high school became table facilitators and people from Watertown Community Conversations also became facilitators at the table. So you looked around this room of 500 people at the Hellenic Center with this buzz, with all these people having these good conversations with each other. So some of our facilitators did that as well.
Matt: 30:26
So what have been, sounds like there's been a lot of success with this project, have there been any particular challenges that you've had to overcome?
Ora: 30:33
One challenge has been all the data that gets generated and how to crunch that data, and so we figured that out and need to figure that out better with the city or whoever else might be a sponsor. Because it's really important that, with so many people participating, Larry said you know over 120 in these small group conversations, that we really have people's thoughts well represented. And so taking that data is just a fair amount of work, and we've had some heroic people on our team that have done that.
Larry: 31:01
My hope is that more and more people do this kind of work as facilitators and people with decision-making authority see the value of it. And again, it's not always the go-to first choice for people who are very busy in city government to say let's take the time to engage people, go out in the community, have these meetings. We have to have three meetings to figure out how to set up the kitchen table conversations. This takes a little while. And we've been under some pressure a few times like we need to do this next month. Well, you can't do this some of the stuff in a month because if you want to do it right, you want to have hosts and you want to train people to be ready and to have the right questions and so on, it takes a while. So I think the pressure of time is always a challenge in doing this kind of work.
Ora: 31:42
I would say you know, it's not a secret that we're living in a time of great polarization and I think these kinds of methodologies help people really come to deeper understanding and bring us out of right and wrong. But to really look at what are people's concerns, what are the interests that need to be met, and look underneath. As I think Peter Senge said, today's problems are yesterday's solutions. So when we rush to quick solutions without really finding out what's going to work for a community, we end up with bigger problems down the line. And Watertown is such a unique and wonderful community where we really can do this as a model for what's possible.
Matt: 32:17
So how many projects are you typically taking on in a year and what is the process for accepting a project and all that type of?
Ora: 32:24
Well, I'm going to state again that we're volunteers.
Matt: 32:26
Yes, of course. Yes.
Ora: 32:29
Larry is now retired. Most of us work full time. So you know we do one or two a year. You know we have a great core group of folks and now we have a cadre of some skilled facilitators, trained facilitators in town. But you know we have limited capacity.
Larry: 32:42
Yeah, we put together an infrastructure process. You said, how do we go about taking on a project like this? So we put together an infrastructure process so that the people who get trained as facilitators understand that there is a process to go through and the process it's flexible somewhat. But, as Ora said earlier, it starts with a sponsor who says they want to do something and they think maybe getting people's opinions would be a good idea, getting some input. Sometimes we know something's happening in the community and we think it's ripe for something like this.
Larry: 33:12
Watertown's a small-ish community where a lot of people know each other right. We've been here over 30 years each of us. So it's not unusual, we could call somebody up and say, hey, by the way, we read about or heard about this project coming up. You know, this might be a good one for, and we have a conversation with them about that. Ultimately they have to say, yes, there's a potential opportunity here. And then we would meet with them. A small group of us would meet with a small group of them and we would kind of sort out what's the POP. What's the purpose for doing this project and getting community engagement. What desired outcomes would you like from getting people's opinions in the community about this.
Larry: 33:47
Okay, we sort that out, takes a little while to clarify that. Make sure the right people are in the room to answer those questions. And then we will take the lead on designing a process that will help them through dialogue, some small groups, some way to engage the community, small groups, big groups. We'll present that back to them and we'll massage it a little bit, figure out who's going to do what in a project, and then we'll get started. And so we would have like a little steering committee, basically of some of us and some of them, and the steering committee would manage the process. That's what we just actually did with the ADUs. Allison, who you talked to, was part of that. Each project has its own little twists and turns. We're going to have a public meeting, what's going to happen with the data afterwards. How do we track the improvements that take place afterwards, and so on, but they basically follow that process.
Matt: 34:32
Right. Something that might be interesting to talk about, too, is, yeah, at the end of a process, how do you go about taking all that information and condensing it down into something useful?
Ora: 34:42
So I'll talk about the ADU, the accessory dwelling unit process, which our piece of that is done, but that still continues and so the planning department is still working on that and they'll still have some more meetings for public input and informational things. But the things that came out of the evening session that we had in March, there were some common themes that now the folks on the planning department and the housing trust will take those things. They're trying to figure out, there's some baseline things that are set by the state that Watertown does not get to decide about ADUs, but there are some things that the community can decide and really take those things and say, oh, people were particularly concerned about green space. That was one of the things that came up often at the dialogue that we had. And so how do we really accommodate that concern about green space? That really will inform their thinking about how they might accommodate that concern.
Larry: 35:32
So our role is to make sure they have that information. Their role is to do something with it. Now, because we're change consultants, we will sometimes ask them, so what are you planning on doing about that? So we nudge them a little bit, if needed. It doesn't always require that. But our job is sort of over when we've gotten them the information that they requested. But sometimes we do a little more after that.
Matt: 35:57
Yeah. Maybe one other question just would be, is there anything that you've changed your approach or mind on through this project, engaging with it?
Larry: 36:07
I guess one thing for me is, when we first started here, we thought this stuff was important just because of our values and what's going on in Watertown, and the way things have unfolded in our society, I'm speaking personally here over the last number of years, I think this stuff is even more important now. And I think there is a receptivity to people getting away from the news sometimes and being able to talk, interact respectfully with each other, and listen to each other. So I just feel like this is a good time to be doing this work.
Ora: 36:39
What he said. Yeah.
Matt: 36:40
I agree. Well, was there anything else about the Watertown Community Conversations that you feel like we didn't hit on that you want to talk about?
Ora: 36:50
I would just encourage folks again, if you're interested in the facilitation training May 2nd and 3rd. That's a really great opportunity to meet folks in the community, to learn some skills, to really contribute to the community. Watertown Community Conversations will be doing more things in the community. Please look out for us and join with us.
Larry: 37:08
Yeah, all of that. And if you're just curious, go to the website, poke around a little bit. We put some resources up there for how to run meetings and how to engage people and what is dialogue and so on. So if people aren't ready to make a commitment to the training, they can certainly take a look at the website. And if they want to even learn more and spend a little more time really finding out what this all is about, how it can benefit themselves and communities, they should read Ora's book. It's called Justice, Love, and Organizational Healing.
Matt: 37:37
I'll link it in the show notes.
Ora: 37:39
Available wherever books are sold.
Matt: 37:42
Cool. Well, it sounds like you already directed me to everything that you want people to go look for. Was there any other closing thoughts to put out there?
Larry: 37:49
Thank you for doing this.
Ora: 37:50
Yeah, thank you so much. And folks who are still listening. Thank you for listening.
Matt: 37:54
Yeah, thank you for taking the time to sit down and share your thoughts and stories of this nice organization here in town.
Ora: 37:59
Thanks so much.
Matt: 38:01
So that's it for my conversation with Larry and Ora. You can find out more information about them where they mentioned. I'll also put all that information in the show notes. You want to find their website, Ora’s book, all that will be in there.
Matt: 38:13
If you like this episode and you want to hear more interviews with people in Watertown and other special episodes I do discovering people, places, stories, and ideas of Watertown, head on over to littellocalconversations.com. You can find all the episodes, find upcoming events, you can subscribe to the newsletter that I send out once a week. And if you really believe in this project, like I do, and you want to help support, there is a support local conversations button on the top right corner of the website, or in the menu if you're on your phone, and there you can pitch in a one-time thing or you can do a monthly amount of support to help keep this project going. So a few things to wrap up. I want to give a thank you to podcast sponsor Arsenal Financial, which is owned by Doug Orifice, who was a committed community member. He's been on the podcast as a guest and in the sponsor episode where we did some Watertown trivia. So you can go back and listen to those, and if you need some help with some financial planning, Arsenal Financial helps out small businesses, busy families, and people close to retirement. So you can check them out at arsenalfinancial.com.
Matt: 39:06
I also want to give a thank you to the Watertown Cultural Council, which has given me a grant this year to help support the podcast. I want to give them the appropriate credit, which is, this program is supported in part by a grant from the Watertown Cultural Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency. You can find out more about them at watertownculturalcouncil.org and massculturalcouncil.org. Also want to give a shout out to a couple of promotional partners, the Watertown Business Coalition, which is a nonprofit organization here in Watertown that's bringing businesses and people together to help strengthen the community. Check them out at watertownbusinesscoalition.com. They have some great community events coming up. And I want to give a thank you to Watertown News, which is a Watertown-focused online newspaper. You can check them out at watertownmanews.com. Great place to keep up to date with everything that's going on in Watertown. All right, so that's it. Until next time, take care.
